Devoutly

Adulterers can be stoned to death and homosexuality is punishable by long prison terms under a new law passed in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province today…The law, which reinforces Aceh’s already strict Islamic laws, is to go into effect within 30 days. Its passage comes two weeks before a new assembly led by the moderate Aceh party is sworn in after a heavy defeat of conservative parties in local elections.

Ah – the conservatives have been voted out, so as a parting gesture, they pass a law saying that ‘adulterers’ can be buried up to the neck and slowly pelted with stones until they are dead – under ‘Islamic’ laws which notoriously have an impossible standard of proof for men but not for women, so that punishments for ‘adultery’ tend to fall exclusively or all but exclusively on women. So that’s life in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province.

6 Responses to “Devoutly”

Greg – Yes, they can. I assume this holds in Indonesia. But here’s a problem I anticipate: if they were to repeal the law, the new government could be criticized by its opponents as wanting to promote adultery.

Far more serious than giving the impression that they were promoting adultery would be the perception that they were anti-Islam. The probability that this law will be repealed in the near term is very low, I should have thought.

But what does ‘cherrypicking’ mean? I understand it to mean selective evidence in support of a particular claim. I don’t accept that I’m doing that. The proposed law is what it is. What have I cherrypicked?

And as for ‘where was your outrage when’ – that’s bullshit. I’m not omniscient; oddly enough, I don’t even claim to be omniscient; I’m also not a newspaper, I don’t claim to cover everything; so what business is it of yours ‘where was my outrage when’?